Simply stated, almost all western nations suffer from the same toxic combination of dependency, demographic decline, and poorly structured entitlement programs.

But some nations are heading in the wrong direction more rapidly than others, and Greece is best example (perhaps I should say worst example?) of a country that is careening toward catastrophe.

It’s such a basket case that I’m not sure whether the politicians or the people deserve the lion’s share of the blame.

The politicians deserve blame because they treat public office as a tool for self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, largely by steering taxpayer money to friends, cronies, contributors, and supporters. Sometimes they do this in a search for votes. Sometimes in a search for cash.

The people deserve blame because they view the state as a magical source of freebies and they see no economic or moral problem with using a coercive government to steal from fellow citizens. They realize the system is corrupt, which is why they seek to evade taxes, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to live at the expense of others.

In a best-case scenario, this type of dysfunctional system reduces prosperity. But when the number of people mooching off the state reaches a critical mass (as illustrated by these two cartoons), then you get societal meltdown.

Which is a good description of what’s happening in Greece.

And even when the government is on the verge of collapse and there’s pressure for reform, the political elite somehow figure out how to screw things up.

The latest example is the possible creation of “special economic zones.” When I first glanced at the story excerpted below, I thought this meant the Greek government was going to create something akin to “enterprise zones” featuring lower tax rates and less red tape.

Because I’m a supporter of the law applying equally to everybody, I’m not a big fan of such policies. I want to reduce the burden of government, of course, but I want that approach for entire countries, not just a handful of areas selected by politicians.

But at least the concept is good, right?

Not when Greek politicians are involved. They have taken the worst features of enterprise zones and combined them with the worst features of redistributionism. Here’s some of the story from Ekathimerini.

The government is paving the way for negotiations with the European Commission regarding the creation of special economic zones (SEZ) in Greece, Development Minister Costis Hatzidakis confirmed on Tuesday in Athens. …“SEZ will give a boost to the basis of the real economy,” said Hatzidakis, reiterating that the existing labor legislation will be fully respected. ..This forms part of the 10-point priority plan Hatzidakis announced yesterday aimed at boosting growth. Changes to the investment incentives law and the fast-track regulations will be completed within the next 15 days. The bill to be prepared will include subsidies of up to 80 percent for smaller companies… Public-private partnerships will be used for bolstering regional growth.

So the zones will keep all the bad labor laws, but provide big subsidies and create “public-private partnerships” (i.e., cronyism).

I hate to sound negative all the time, but that sounds precisely like the kind of nonsense that put Greece in a ditch to begin with.

To be fair, the article does talk about targeted tax relief and accelerated procedures for dealing with red tape. But that’s not exactly good news. Targeted tax cuts are a form of discrimination and they create an environment favorable to lobbying and corruption. And while it seems like good news to approve licenses more quickly, why not just get rid of bureaucratic hurdles? After all, this is the country (this is not a joke) that requires stool samples from entrepreneurs seeking to set up online companies.

It’s very hard to have any optimism after reading this type of story. Greece surely is an example of statism run amok, but let’s return to the point I made above about almost all other western nations heading in the same direction. Greece may be closest to the fiscal cliff, but the rest of us are driving in the same direction.

P.S. The BIS and OECD numbers show that the United States is in worse shape – in the long run – than every European welfare state. I assume this is largely based on assumptions of health care spending rising more rapidly in America. The bad news is that this is a reasonable assumption (thanks to our third-party payer problem). The good news is that we can easily solve the problem with a combination of entitlement reform (which deals with a direct cause of third-party payer) and tax reform (which deals with an indirect cause of third-party payer).

Prosperity through centralized mandated channeling of productivity to activities that would not exist without the subsidies (ie the forced redirection of productivity). Sounds like the terminal dream of HopNChange to me. That is the state Americans will find themselves in when HpNchange completes its irreversible changes. It there might be a little bit of time for that. While France enters the Greek stage, America still has to go through the French stage first. Seems like that journey started for Americans some time ago but reached the irreversible point of no return in 2008. That was the point that demonstrated the convergence of American culture to the rest of the world, the same rest of the world people once escaped from to come to America. That year, 2008, was the year when Americans would react to the failures of mandatory collectivism by voting for even more mandatory collectivism. As you can see, the cycle has became irreversible, as it continues, with Relublicans also adopting it more and more in order to keep some slim chances of reelection amongst a population that will react to the failures of statism by asking for more help, ie even more statism Americans’ fate is sealed.

But this is a self inflicted decline that is isolated to three hundred million Americans and a few more European voter lemmings who are desperately adopting the very mandatory collectivism that once kept most of the world in misery. As their relative prosperity converges to the world average, they will fade away from the world scene. So as western voter lemmings continue their self-destruction, Humanity as a whole is better than ever, now riding an unprecedented 5% annual growth trendline. It is a wonderful time to be human. Too bad for Americans that a world where they have converged to mid worldwide prosperity will feel different. Very very different.

[…] I’m not sure which politician is most deserving of scorn. Is it Prime Minister Necas, who is channeling the spirit of George H.W. “read my lips” Bush as he leads his party over the cliff? Or is it Prime Minister Radicova of Slovakia, who got her party tossed from power because she decided her nation’s taxpayers should support the corrupt vote-buying schemes of Greek politicians? […]

Hitler did not look at history and he attacked Russia in the fall and he repeated the mistakes of history when the Russian winter took him down. Why can’t we learn from history. Greece has a bloated government and is doing down in flames because of the welfare state. However, we are heading down the same road.

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